Sunday, July 8. 2012

A few days ago I was re-installing a laptop of mine. Downloading the default add-ons for Firefox came to a stall as I could not find SyncPlaces, which I've been using for a few years to synchronize my bookmarks between the systems I use. As I knew the author, Andy Halford, has a homepage I surfed there and found...

"So long Mozilla and thanks for all the fish

If you are here looking for any of my extensions (SyncPlaces, SortPlaces, CheckPlaces or SearchPlaces) then I'm sad to inform you that these are no longer available.

Unfortunately I do not have the time or the motivation to continue to support these in light of the close-minded, short-sighted and increasingly inflexible organisation that Mozilla has become. Apparently spending 1000's of hours promoting their products and providing my extensions to the general public to fill the gaps in their product, and repair bookmarks destroyed by Firefox Sync, counts for little and does not deserve any flexibility or support from them. Apparently add-on developers are second-class citizens to them whatever they may say. Surprising given that these are the main USP of Firefox, and developers are providing their time and efforts for free. My decision was taken after a series of problems the last one being the final straw."Andy Halford, 17.06.12screenshot

I was unable to find any details what caused this rant and the serious decision to remove his excellent add-ons from the Internet.
There are a few discussions on the Mozillazine forums but nothing enlightening so far.
Andy's personal homepage, family homepage and the TotalValidator product he and his wife offer are all still online, he just pulled all his popular Firefox add-ons.

Andy states on his homepage

"I will not be answering any further emails on this matter, I suggest that you direct any questions to Mozilla themselves and ask them why they were happier for me to leave than to use a little common sense." [ib.]

I still tried to contact him and asked for an interview but he has not come back to me so far. I've sent a second email with the URL of this blog post.

Now this is a mess. With some ungraciously licensed closed source software, you're probably used to plan migrations once license terms run out or you have to upgrade to the much improved successor product because "extended support" for your perfectly fine current version gets ridiculously expensive.

But with open source you have more rights and e.g. the security to use the product as long as you wish. If you have kept a copy of the code (and the license file). Because in this case the Mozilla Firefox installer .xpi's are hard to come by. Mozilla has a centralized add-on repository and once the files are pulled from there, they quickly vanish off the net. Now don't get me wrong, these plug-ins are now unmaintained software, so you will have to migrate at some point in time, but not necessarily now. You have some time for planning and evaluation of alternatives.

The advantage of open source licensing to the user

Luckily the ftp.belnet.be add-ons mirror seems to not synchronize deletes. So I was able to pull all of Andy's plug-ins from a known good source without resorting to somewhat dubious link spam/content duplication sites.

SyncPlaces, 8426 - Synchronize bookmarks and passwords between different installations of Firefox
(using your own ftp/webdav/file server)
v5.1.0D (patched version from gorticus, see the update from 15.12.14 below)
Local mirror: syncplaces-5.1.0D.xpi [214kB]
md5sum: 12895a850bf83e69c6a2f09c58ba0bf9
sha1sum: ba2baaff7f76f25e76de6882f1dfe9fd187f11d8

v5.1.0 (last original version from Andy from the Mozilla add-on repository)
Local mirror: syncplaces-5.1.0-sm+fx.xpi [241kB]
md5sum: 4ad7b1a167c05ab683c72d9f0097f4ec
sha1sum: bfd9d5603b5740cf3c7777037ebcf21d100da4a8

v5.2.0 (last original version from Andy's homepage, see the update from 07.07.14 below)
Local mirror: syncplaces520.xpi [245kB]
md5sum: 355e10877d83a36ec445f0ebd65a3a24
sha1sum: 022760ff2129f7eb8668d4578f5300ad7f1e10c6

There was a lot of well written documentation on Andy's site but these pages were copyrighted by him and not published under a free (documentation) license so I cannot mirror these.
I was able to find site mirrors from 2011 on archive.org's wayback machine.
Give it a shot while it's still there.

The unmaintained status of these plug-ins

Mozilla has defined a version identifier within the install manifest contained inside .xpi's that tells Firefox whether the version of the plug-in is deemed compatible. Inside the .xpi files linked above this is:

<em:maxVersion>13.*</em:maxVersion>

for SortPlaces, CheckPlaces and Seachplaces. Andy already put version 14.* in the install manifest for SyncPlaces.

Firefox currently seems on a run to achieve main version jump after jump as fast as possible (marketing suggests the average customer perception will be tilted towards "surely a version 23 must be superior to a product 3.0"). But as the add-ons can hardly keep pace, the strictness of honouring those maxVersion identifiers seems somewhat reduced now. Still, YMMV. If you read this while Firefox is at version 15+ (so sometime soon ) you may need to open the .xpi and manually tweak the install.rdf file to fix, sort or sync your bookmarks.

This is unmaintained and unsupported software until Andy changes his mind or somebody picks it up.
Please refrain from asking support questions in the comments section below.

18.12.2015: Firefox 43 requires signed add-ons

Firefox 43 is out and this version requires signed add-ons now. It still can be disabled via a config entry, see the Mozilla Wiki but this in turn will be removed again for the next release, Firefox 44.

So the grace period preserving these add-ons originally authored by Andy Halford has finally come to an end.
We squeezed out another 3 and a half years, so this has been a very long period to eventually say good bye to bookmarks.
Or at least to a sensible way bookmark collections were manageable. When the web was still distributed and people had a life outside of Facebook .

31.05.2015: Release of checkplaces v2.6.5 by Stefan Martens

Stefan collected the patches available elsewhere and combined them into a checkplaces v2.6.5 that works again with the brand new FF 38.0.1.
Thank you very much for your effort, Stefan!
Grab a copy of checkplaces-2.6.5.xpi [123kB] while its hot and take a look at the checkplaces changelog [5kB].

15.12.2014: Release of syncplaces v5.2.0D by gorticus

Jason Mitchell (gorticus) patched syncplaces to get rid of the PlacesUtils.history.getCharsetForURI(uri) that broke in FF 34. He set up a Github repository for his code and I provide a local mirror again as this one is compatible with Andy's licenses.
Maxversion is set to FF 34 on this .xpi, so get it while it's hot . syncplaces-5.1.0D.xpi [214kB]. The syncplaces changelog [8kB] has been updated as usually.

makes we wonder though whether that glimpse into history hints at what got Mozilla and Andy so much disgruntled with each other.

Andy:"I ain't no updating my plugin every few weeks 'cause every tiny release now ups the major version."Mozilla: "Well, that won't go into the add-ons repository then. It is your duty to test each and every version [... lots of explanatory motivation blurb ...]".
</speculation>

Thanks again for the pointers Pavel.

02.09.2013: Improved version v5.1.0C of syncplaces

Graham packaged the patches TheChief and Strony Internetowe contributed in the comments below and I've tweaked the version number in install.rdf and the maxversion setting to create syncplaces-5.1.0C-sm+fx.xpi [217kB]. This one will work with Firefox 23 but I have had a report that it does not work with an HTTPS server. YMMV.

Review the syncplaces changelog [7kB] for the full account of the continued hacking on Andy's former masterpiece.

25.07.2013: Improved version v5.1.0B of syncplaces

Frank Kirchner packaged the patches Klaus, V and TheChief contributed in the comments below and sent me syncplaces-5.1.0B-sm+fx.xpi [221kB]. This one will work with Firefox 22 but may stop working again with Firefox 23+ as Frank indicates in his comment below. Thanks Frank!

14.07.2013: Improved version v2.6.2B of checkplaces

Scott Sanders writes:

I have modified CheckPlaces as you suggested and was able to repack it and have it work properly. Attached is the file that I have renamed checkplaces-2.6.2B-fx+sm.xpi that works just fine for me with Firefox 22. This add-on is by far the best bookmark checker I have used and was hoping you could put it on your site for others to use.

Apparently the Belnet mirror has been re-worked and now uses e.g. http://ftp.belnet.be/ftp.mozilla.org/addons/9275/ dropping the "mirror" top-level directory. Sadly so with that change apparently deletes were synchronized so the addons/xyz directories for Andy's plugins are now empty as on the other mirrors.

18.06.2013: Improved version v1.9.2B of sortplaces

Marc from Montreal, Canada, writes:

Thanks for keeping those excellent plugins. I was dismayed like everybody else when SortPlaces was failing with the "Livemarks" bug so I made a simple mod to remove it and I renamed the plugin as 1.9.2B so nobody gets confused. I tested it and it works great. Considering that I have close to 3000 bookmarks that were "accidentally" sorted alphabetically with another plugin, let's say I was very motivated.

He disabled special livemarks handling code in Andy's last version and updated the sortplaces plugin to be compatible with Firefox versions up to 22.x.

Thanks a lot for mirroring SyncPlaces - I've changed my computer and really needed this to sync back all my bookmarks.

On the other hand - it's sad to hear Andy's story, details I think are not that important. As I see, addons/apps that are solving real problems (sync to MY OWN cloud), are shuting down for one reason or another (eg: foxmarks byos, now syncplaces).

Thank you very much for this - I have no interest whatsoever in using the builtin firefox sync feature, much prefer to store bookmarks and passwords on my own server. Would love to switch to Chrome because mozilla seems to be on a mission to alienate users (and developers) but haven't yet found a good Chrome alternative to this plugin

Thanks for preserving these add-ons. I had to do a reinstall and was sad to see CheckPlaces and SortPlaces had been removed by the author from the Mozilla add-ons site.

I'm really getting frustrated with Mozilla's relentless Firefox updates and I'm not surprised talented developers like Mr Halford get pissed off and leave. I will too, once I find a suitable alternative to Firefox.

And as of June 2012 Mozilla thinks you had the best way to sort bookmarks….

http://kb.mozillazine.org/Sorting_bookmarks_alphabetically

This page was last modified 17:25, 26 June 2012. This page has been accessed 287,876 times. About MozillaZine Knowledge Base

“The best way of sorting bookmarks is with the "SortPlaces extension, which although no longer available on the Addons site, can still be found by an Internet search elsewhere. This extension will be mentioned several times relative to different aspects of this article.”

Unfortunately not. Andy has not come back to me at all. He updated the text on his web page a bit against the screenshot in the article and now states: "[D]on't expect anything other than at best a standard response blaming me [from Mozilla]. As I do not wish to encourage anyone to use Mozilla's products at this time, I will not be hosting or providing these extensions to anyone." (andyhalford.com, retrieved 16.09.2012)

If you didn't reinstall FF and make a new user profile, Syncplaces install file is lurking still in your user profile/extensions folder under the name syncplaces@andyhalford.com.xpi. So you can save it for later use.
However, it seems that it does not work 100% under FF 14. It sends the files to the server, but on receiving it ends with a Path not found error message.

Thanks so much for the article and the links, Daniel, as well as your efforts to contact Andy. As a contributor to Phil Chee's (Xsidebar) collection of extensions modified for SeaMonkey (http://xsidebar.mozdev.org/modifiedmisc.html and http://xsidebar.mozdev.org/modifiedmailnews.html), I've been familiar with - and have used - CheckPlaces for some time (later versions supported SeaMonkey out of the box).

Andy's frustration with MSF (or more appropriately, the people involved) was/is palpable from his text. It's truly disappointing when an organization which prides itself on community involvement in development can do so much damage.

Thanks Daniel for the article and for mirroring the addons. And thanks for the links to other mirrors. I downloaded the SortPlaces addon from the Belnet mirror. I am using Firefox 15.0.1. For those who don't this, as I didn't, one installs it by clicking "addons" from the Firefox tools menu. Then click the gear wheel to get its dropdown menu. Then click "install add-on from file". Browse to the .xpi addon file on your PC. Install.

Thank you for the tips. I am using SyncPlaces with Firefox 16.0.1 and it is OK. I didn't do any tweak to the files.
Has anyone found any good replacement which doesn't copy the bookmarks to the internet?

Well. I was just doing some leisurely review & upkeep on my add-ons collection ... clicked Andy Halford's link in his Checkplaces dialog, just for grins ... and ended up here (after further searching).

The intense upgrade cycle at Firefox, and the "forcing" of updates, is not a good sign. Like the old song says "Nobody does it better, but sometimes I wish someone would".

Everybody says (in regard to 'upgrade-frenzy' & other points), 'What the heck are they doing'?! But of course, no one can answer the question.

Thanks to Mr. Halford for his products that fit my needs so well; and thanks to Daniel Lange for finding & posting fresh copies of the now unavailable add-ons.

Thanks for creating a forum for those concerned by the discontinuation of SyncPlaces. Fingers crossed it still sorft of works for me, albeit only one way. If I sync from both my 64bit linux everything is fine and picked up by my old 32bit laptop. If I make changes though from that 32bit machine, the hashes get b0rked and no sync is possible anymore.

Thanks to you for hunting down copies of these excellent Firefox add-ons. Even more thanks to Andy Halford for having developed and maintained them. I have anew laptop so want to do a synch, like many, not iterested in synch-ing over "the cloud".

Firefox is now bread without butter

I echo the general feeling here, thank you very much to provide a repository for these add-ons, and to give some explanation about the cause.

Please, Andy, change your mind

Wouldn't Halford reconsider his decision, for the sake of his user base? That would be nice .

I have a bookmark collection of ~2'5000 bookmark. I use a folder tree and tags. These add-ons have been the core of my bookmark management, for years:

Syncplaces

Sorplcaces

I have always loved these high quality add-ons. The Andy Halford pages were very clear, and Andy's personal feedback has been equally good.

All the work gone?

After all it's just a dispute(s). People change or get replaced, eventually. I don't think Mozilla cares at all; they have a sync service to push. But we, the users of these add-ons do care. We are the only one saddened and affected by Andy's decisions.

Thanx for the archive. I followed a link from a Mozilla tutorial on sorting bookmarks to Andy Halfords website, to be greeted by the "Thanks For all the Fish..." notice. So I googled my way to your site here and found the 'sortplaces' xpi. Installed it like normal on Firefox 20 and it works like a charm. Really sad to see such a great coder withdraw his unique products like this. No decent replacement for 'sortplaces'. I've saved the other 3 add-ons on general principle and to use later. Inspired, I went to the wayback machine and opened every page of Andy's documentation in tabs and saved it all as an .mht file with all the associated downloads.

I am very happy to have these plug ins back. It is unfortunate that large companies tend to favor vendors offering pay services over the independents offering better solutions with less overhead and less risk. Does anyone know where the source source for syncplaces and sortplaces can be obtained? A big thanks to Andy and I understand his reluctance to deal with a company that has done him wrong.

Thanks for Sortplaces V1.92B. Any chance of uploading it as a new plugin to Mozilla?. Andy will be getting loads error emails from people using his version with FF22 which I doubt he will appreciate. If he does not want to continue that's fine, but I consider it essential to FF

I still consider this unsupported software so I'd personally not try to make it easy for new users to stumble upon it in the Mozilla Add-Ons directory.
And if Andy gets lots of emails - perhaps he'll reconsider. I'm sure many people would be very happy.

I also got the same problem as many here!
SortPlaces seems to work again with version 1.9.2B from Marc! Thanks a lot for that!

Now let's come back to SyncPlaces:
I just played around with FF 22 and SyncPlaces 5.1.0 and found a curious way to export my bookmarks, but ONLY ONCE.
Here's how I did it, can anybody confirm it, please:

In the options of SyncPlaces I added the option to export my bookmarks as .html file too, not only as .json file!
After doing so I was able to export my bookmarks to my usual place (an usb-stick) over FTP protocol!

After restarting my FF 22 the bug was there again and I had to redo the procedure again to export my bookmarks (again)...

Same here! We installed Firefox v22 on a brand-new HP Win7Pro machine, new profile, new everything. Now doing a receive in SyncPlaces just gets the errorL

"COULD NOT SAVE BOOKMARKS"

Five hours spent trying different things in FF with no luck. Just great...the only browser extension that allows syncing of bookmark .json files using a private server, and it's now officially broken. >:(

Can't anyone talk to Andy about giving up the source so this can be fixed??? The community doesn't need any new features, nor even hosted on Mozilla. Just updated to keep it working. Uggghh

The source is inside the .xpi's. They are basically .zip files with Javascript and some metadata inside. No need for Andy to publish anything else. You have everything you need to fix it available. If your company lacks the skill to develop in Javascript, I'm sure you can find a capable developer willing to fix SyncPlaces for a fee.

In Firefox 22.0 the above error now appears when I try to use the original, or the new sortplaces-1.9.2B-sm+fx.xpi from Marc from Montreal. Any chance of some advice, or a guess on the problem?
Thanx Marc! I am so glad Daniel and you are working to keep this add-on going.

mhmm, we really need someone with a bit programming skills to get it working again. i googled like a pro, theres nothing when u want to sync with your own ftp plus encryption :/
maaaaarc, do it agaiiin

maybe I just found a also maybe dirty solution for our FF 22 SyncPlaces impact!

Here's how I did it:

I've only modified one line in the Javascript code of SyncPlaces in the file bookmarks.js to now:

Line# 751: if(PlacesUtils.nodeIsQuery(node)) {

The old line# 751 looked like this:
if (PlacesUtils.nodeIsQuery(node) || PlacesUtils.nodeIsLivemarkContainer(node)) {

So as you can see I've simply removed the second part of the OR operator and itself in the if statement to get rid of the function call: PlacesUtils.nodeIsLivemarkContainer(node)
which caused the execption!

My first tests just a few minutes ago are looking good...

Maybe someone out there want's to test my modification on his own machine...

Here is my fix for SyncPlaces "COULD NOT SAVE BOOKMARKS" (TypeError: PlacesUtils.livemarks.isLivemark is not a function) issue.

WARNING!!! Do at your own risk! Also this may screw things up if you are using Live Marks (RSS).

1) Find this file and make a backup copy: "C:\Documents and Settings\xxx\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxx\extensions\syncplaces@andyhalford.com\chrome\content\bookmarks.js"

2) In bookmarks.js using text editor replace all occurences of "PlacesUtils.nodeIsLivemarkContainer(child)" and "PlacesUtils.nodeIsLivemarkContainer(node)" with "false". Case sensitive! For example old line:

thanks to you and thechief for your fix, u made me happy for some min. i stopped being happy when i checked the fix with firefox 23 beta 2... the error message 'cant save bookmarks' was back
maybe i did something wrong, would be nice if someone could check it too. i used the fix of 'v' with the false command.
thanks for your work, v and thechief. was a try...

I really appreciate you updating these add-on's for the newer versions of FireFox. I didn't update FireFox because the newer versions didn't work with CheckPlaces or SortPlaces. Whatever the upgrades from 14.01 to 22.00 were, without CheckPlaces or SortPlaces it wasn't worth it.

I'm happy to report that your updates work just fine with Version 22.00 of FireFox.

I patched all the js files of syncplaces to no longer reference the removed API. Dowload the files from http://www.upload.ee/files/3455453/content_after_removing_dead_API.zip.html and put the files into your c:\Users\you\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\profile.default\extensions\syncplaces@andyhalford.com\chrome\content. Hope it works for you as well.

Wow, spent all day on this. Ok, here is final resolution, I hope. I rolled back to version 21 and that seemed to work with the 1.92B from Marc, but then the darn thing updated to 22 even though I had set it to NOT update and custom installed it so that it would NOT install the background Firefox maintain software.

Anyway, one problem I ran into was the bookmark add dates all being made the same. Again, saved by xmarks, but it had problems too. It wouldn't sync propersly.

Version 22 of Firefox

Version 4.2.1 that show sup in the addon window of Firefox NOT the lastest 4.2.3 from Xmarks site.

This seems to be a stable solution. I'm lobbying Xmarks to step in and solve this problem, they were bought by LastPass. They have the resources to stay on top of this. They should work with Marc to ensure that a stable combination of Firefox, Sort Places, and Xmarks is available so folks canpublish RSS feeds and public shares of bookmarks.

I'm sorry to disappoint you, this is unsupported software and been unsupported for more than a year, see the section in the article above. There is no "please fix". Fix it yourself if you need it. It's open source. Time to learn some JavaScript.

@Graham: Thanks for your fix. Please give your version a differential name (for example with suffix C instead of B). Otherwise it can be cofused with B version of Frank Kirchner.
@Daniel Lange: Could you update your main article "Updates" please.
@all: What is about license/right? Is it legal to post xpi files in www and is it permitted from mozilla's point of view?

Somehow the SW also stopped working over here... But when I download the file syncplaces-5.1.0C-sm+fx.xpi mentioned above, it still reports itself as revision 'B' - and doesn't really work with a fresh install of FF23.
Could there be a mixup with the revisions?

Graham's version is only renamed (file wise) to "C", the one I made and linked within the blog entry also has the version identifier within install.rdf set to "5.1.0C". So that one should report itself accurately in the add-ons list.

As I do not really depend too much on the RSS feeds, I simply deleted them and now receiving the bookmarks back from the server is also working... I'm fully aware that simply removing some entries from the bookmarks is not a general solution that can be taken seriously, but at least in my case it solved this problem...

That's another hack that'll work until Mozilla removes that interface as well, it's depreciated now (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/XPCOM_Interface_Reference/nsILivemarkService).

IMHO SyncPlaces either needs a major overhaul with the new API (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Places_Developer_Guide) or it will die for good. We squeezed more than a year of additional usage out of it, so that's pretty impressive already.

Then, most likely, you do not have Livemarks (bookmarks to RSS feeds).

For me, the latest version available here gave the error "invalid or corrupted bookmarks received" - culprit was the reference to PlacesUtils.livemarks.createLivemarkFolderOnly (as described above).

Fortunately, the API changes currently affect the Livemark system only, and there are only two references which need to be updated in SyncPlaces: PlacesUtils.livemarks.createLivemarkFolderOnly and PlacesUtils.nodeIsLivemarkContainer

I have now updated both of them to point to the current API.
Please find the updated version 5.1.1-GR for download at http://home.arcor.de/dac324/firefox/syncplaces/syncplaces-5.1.1-GR.xpi

Update: After fiddling around with the JavaScript peculiarities (new methods have to be inserted into an existing object at the very last position, otherwise, the whole object will not be found any more) I have now restored the Livemarks functionality. Both PlacesUtils.livemarks.createLivemarkFolderOnly and PlacesUtils.nodeIsLivemarkContainer are replaced by alternative coding and at least I do not get livemarks-related errors any more.
Download at http://home.arcor.de/dac324/firefox/syncplaces/syncplaces-5.1.2.xpi

Seems that this mail got lost somewhere. At least I did not receive it. Meanwhile, I have incorporated some changes, resulting in version 5.1.2 downloadable at http://home.arcor.de/dac324/firefox/syncplaces/syncplaces-5.1.2.xpi .

What documentation issue are you referring to? I have to admit that the links in the add-on still point to Andy's pages which are not available any more. I fetched a copy from web.archive.org but it has to be edited a little bit before including it into the add-on.

I sent it 20.09.13 18:23 CEST. Have a look.
The issue is that Andy's documentation is not under a free license but his personal copyright. So you cannot legally copy and redistribute it. In my humble opinion you may be able to link to archive.org but IANAL.

I was staying at FF 22 just because Syncplaces 5.1.0b supposedly only worked up to FF 22 or 23. I finally bit the bullet and upgraded to FF 27 last night just for security purposes and of course Syncplace quit working via FTP. I found your 5.1.2 version and it works just fine in FF 27.

Daniel:
This might be a bit off topic so I'll leave it to you whether or not you want to post it. One way to avoid all this is to stay with an old version. Unfortunately FireFox will at some point force you to upgrade. You can avoid this by changing the Update Channel.

=======================================

To get off the Update Channel, use Notepad and change the value in:
C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\defaults\pref\channel-prefs.js
from "esr" or "release", or whatever is in there to "default". The contents of the file look like this:

============================================

//@line 2 "e:\builds\moz2_slave\yyy\build\browser\app\profile\channel-prefs.js"
/* This Source Code Form is subject to the terms of the Mozilla Public
* License, v. 2.0. If a copy of the MPL was not distributed with this
* file, You can obtain one at http://mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/. */

pref("app.update.channel", "default");

============================================

Once you do this, FireFox will never check for updates and you can run old versions for as long as you want. I did this, and restored my 14.01 working directory and no "update demons" came a calling.

Please notice though: The reason for Firefox updates is usually a bunch of security relevant bugs that were fixed. So if you run an old version in a protected Intranet environment that may be fine, out in the Internet it is not advisable to use anything but the latest version.

To replace SyncPlaces I'd recommend taking a look at Syncserver (https://www.unixadm.org/software/syncserver/), a perl script that will allow you to host your own Firefox sync server which is relatively easy to setup. But you obviously need some hosting that can execute perl scripts. A FTP or WebDav account as for SyncPlaces is not sufficient.

THANK YOU Daniel!!! I have been looking for a solution like SyncPlaces forever.

I run Firefox sandboxed in a VMWare virtual machine which restores to the original disk image each time I shut down. Which means all the bad stuff I picked up while surfing is gone..... along with all my new bookmarks. I had been using a different solution but it was saving the whole firefox profile which kind of negated some of the advantage.

I´m syncing between 3 machines here (Ubuntu, Fedora & Win7) with FTP and have no problems with passwords on the Server. Sometimes there comes a message that the data can not be saved but 2 or 3 manually triggered syncs later it works.
The empty message-box appears sometimes, but i´ve not seen anything wrong with my data...

Due to some problems with Flash I upgraded from Version 17 to the latest esr version which is 24.3.0 and was hoping both CheckPlaces and SortBookmarks worked in the newer versions.

When I imported the Bookmarks.json file from the previous version and sorted the bookmarks, SortBookmarks ran, and didn't complain.

When I ran CheckPlaces it ran and didn't complain but didn't update the Favicons as it usually did. But I found an easy workaround. Provided you had a backed up your previous bookmarks by saving them as HTML as well as JSON.

Here's what I discovered. There are no Favicons in the JSON file. I went back several backups and looked. Not a one. So where do they hide. The answer is in places.sqlite but when you import a new Bookmarks.json it replaces everything in places.sqlite, and when you run CheckPlaces, along with checking the web sites, it used to get the favicons and write them to places.sqlite. Something in the newer versions of FireFox are preventing CheckPlaces from doing this.

But I found an easy workaround. I backup my bookmarks weekly, and saved them as a .JSON file as well as "Export to HTML" so I can import the FireFox bookmarks into any other browser. Although I had never used the HTML file to import into FireFox, I figured I'd try it. Much to my surprise, all the Favicons were there after I imported the HTML file.

The only downside to this is that when you import the HTML file, it adds to the existing bookmarks, whereas the JSON file replaces them. NBD, I just deleted all the old ones without the Favicons, and I'm happy again.

To keep the icons, just Export the bookmarks as HTML and they will all be saved, or save off the Places.sqlite that has the Favicons stored. Either way works.

Well I was wrong about Favicons not being stored in the file Places.sqlite. They are all there, both the web addresses and I'm pretty sure the favicons themselves, although I can't be 100% sure.

I searched high and low for a program to view the Sqlite files that FireFox uses but came up empty. The program that I had used before, an addon for FireFox, Sqlite Manager doesn't work with the newer versions of FireFox.

I did find one that will read the Sqlite files that FireFox uses. It's called sqlitestudio-2.1.5.exe and the link for it is here: http://sqlitestudio.pl

With it I was able to export the tables in Places.Sqlite, and there is one called moz_favicons that has all of the favicons in it, as well as the web addresses. I'm pretty sure that the information stored in the table is the actual favicon code itself, but I'm not 100% sure.

I'm sure there are others that will read the files, but so far SqliteStudio is the best I've found. To save you some effort, here's a list of the programs that didn't work:
LINQPad4Setup
Sqlite_manager-0.8.1-fx+tb+sm.xpi
SQLite2009Pro-v3.8.3.1
Sqliteadmin_0.8.3.2.zip
Sqlitebrowser_200_b1_win.zip
Sqlitemanager-0.7.7-all.xpi

Wonderful to have found these as I'm doing update routines this week (prompted by support for WinXP ending)... I've been frozen at Firefox 19 for awhile now ... but, I noticed I have been running version 5.2.0 of Syncplaces from Andy via the Waybackmachine, I see no references to that version here.

According to the changelog:

5.2.0 (26th May 2012)

o Added interface to logging system to the Advanced tab

As an exercise in learning Java, I may try running diffs and seeing if I can fold that into 5.1.0C from here, once I see what the effective change actually is when I (back/forward version to 5.1.0C)

I am glad that I found this page since I have used Andy's add-ons for years. The modified SortPlaces and CheckPlaces versions found here work fine with Firefox 30. Nobody can blame Andy for getting fed up with Mozilla. I recall thinking that it was an incredibly stupid idea for Mozilla to both fast track and name each new version of Firefox with a new version number. In a couple of years we will be up to Firefox 101 or whatever. Just stupid, as it goes against all standard practices for program version numbering.

I'm using SyncPlaces against Subversion server backend over HTTPS. SyncPlaces v5.1.0C stopped working for me with release of Firefox 22, so I was pinned down to FF21. Now that I've upgraded to FF30, I find that v5.1.0C works! Happy to be back on latest browser version.

Thank you very much for preserving these great add-ons. I prefer to keep my bookmark backups on my own server, and sync places lets me easily do that unlike Mozilla's built-in sync which is almost impossible to configure to store backups locally.

I would love to see a single download link somewhere on this page that would take visitors to the latest versions of the plugins if possible. There are several releases of sync places on this page, and all seem to be located in a different spot, and that makes it difficult to know which version is the latest and where to get it.

The versions not linked explicitly (and not hosted on my site) are not conforming to the license of Andy's website documentation (personal copyright not GFDL or a permissive CC license). I keep respecting Andy's license choices.

just FYI: As I was able to find a replacement for PlacesUtils.nodeIsLiveMarkContainer() in SyncPlaces, I have now incorporated this replacement in SortPlaces, too.
Thus, SortPlaces is now able to sort LiveMarks (RSS Feeds) again
You can download version 1.9.3 of SortPlaces at http://home.arcor.de/dac324/firefox/sortplaces/sortplaces-1.9.3.xpi

Sadly, because Mozilla has added a requirement to the latest version of Firefox that all add-ons must be signed by Mozilla, these incredibly useful tools are disable in newer(40 or so and later) releases of Firefox. They still work just fine in recent versions and the sorted or checked places work fine when ported to the current Firefox, but unless someone can take the time to get a signoff from Mozilla they will not operate in current or future versions of Firefox.

You can disable the add-ons must be signed/verified by Mozilla function.

I do not recommend following the below instructions unless you are very sure you know what your doing.

Type about:config in the browser's address bar and hit enter. This loads Firefox's main configuration page.
Confirm the warning prompt when it appears.
Search for the preference xpinstall.signatures.required
Double-click on it to toggle its value.

You can get signed version easily. Just create an account on addons.mozilla.org and submit the addon + check that it won't be listed on AMO. Then you will get only preliminary checks and you can download your signed copy of extension and host it here.

I did it now for CheckPlaces and it got automatically signed. I just had to change 2 things:

1) ID which was considered duplicate, so I had to change it
2) maxSupportedVersion can be only 48, not higher.

I am using Firefox 49 and I found out how to disable the silly requirement to have signed extensions. You can find out how to do this if you search for the web pages entitled:
"Disable add-on signature enforcement in Firefox 49 and above" from winaero, and,
"How to override the Firefox Add-on Signing requirement" from ghacks.
I now have CheckPlaces 2.6.5 running in Firefox 49! It works!

Thanks Daniel Lange, for saving this addons and preserving this work and legacy from Andy Halford beyond himself as author, it is very appreciated

A Developer remembers

For those who are disappointed with Firefox Quantum by Mozilla Corporation about legacy-addons and XUL support, you can use pre Firefox57-forks like PaleMoon/Basilisk or WaterFox (extended Firefox ESR support)

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